The United States is deathly ill from fighting a century-long chronic infection (call it Bacterium Progressivism) that Americans can no longer afford to ignore. Donald Trump claims he has (or is) the cure for what currently plagues this nation, but a number of conservative intellectuals are horrified by the idea and point out that Trump is no conservative at all and would be merely a dose of snake oil. As Ben Shapiro outlines at Breitbart, to whatever extent Trump is conservative, his record shows he’s at best a very recent convert. Of course, the symptom-free D.C. establishment want to see both Trump and Cruz dumped so constituents can be force-fed another useless placebo disguised as the next blockbuster cure.

I don’t know the appropriate length of time for an individual to be held in quarantine after having claimed to have been cured of some or all their formerly progressive contagion. I’m sure a Thomas Sowell or David Horowitz could better provide guidance here. What I do know is that to date, Trump has gained support by blasting through a wall of political correctness and successfully delivering certain messages that resonate with a large number of people who are justly concerned about the survival of the United States. But this is true only because Trump is seen as a D.C. outsider and his supporters believe (rightly or wrongly) that he will actually help deliver needed medicine to at least one or more areas of this terrible infection.

Perhaps a better analogy for the Trump phenomenon is that he more resembles what is called a liposome than any form of medicine. A liposome is a microscopic membrane shell that can be used to encapsulate things such as antibiotics and deliver them more effectively to specifically targeted areas of infection (I only know this because I’m invested in a biotech that’s using liposomes to deliver a common antibiotic directly to serious lung infections). What’s the use in administering a known effective drug (even a superior one) if it has little chance of ever reaching its intended target?

When certain infections are left untreated for too long, the bacteria can form a slime-like protective barrier called a biofilm that is extremely resistant to antibiotics. By using liposomes to carry medicine with an electric charge opposite that of the biofilm, instead of getting hung up in the biofilm (opposite charges attract), some of the same (previously ineffective) antibiotic is able to slip past the biofilm before being released where the bacteria are hiding, giving the drug a much higher chance of eradicating the disease.

While the Republican establishment occasionally pays lip-service to prescribing the medicine needed to save the U.S., it is clear that they have no interest in actually administering it, as the GOPe is part of what is in essence a biofilm. A biofilm protecting big-government in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere that is made up of politicians of both parties, media elites, cronies, big-education, Hollywood and scores of political pundits. This slime-barrier is tightly bound together with propaganda, political correctness, unlimited excuses, fabulous social gatherings and bundles and bundles of other people’s money.

Sure, a controlled dose of liberty-saving medicine may occasionally be permitted to bypass the biofilm and briefly slow down the progression of the disease to pacify the masses. But the establishment — human nature being what it is — mostly disallows anything other than placebo from penetrating the biofilm and reaching the steadily growing abscess that is Washington D.C. Trump’s seeming ability to penetrate this D.C. biofilm (as an outsider), while promising to use medicine that is positive (+) America, is why so many are willing to take a chance with him. And why the establishment of both parties are so terrified of him.

Trump clearly has a mixed ideological record and I certainly find many of his past (and recent) statements troubling and contradictory. But I do recognize and admire his ability to penetrate this D.C. biofilm. The thing is, if Trump truly wants to “make America great again” — a goal I suspect is as genuine as Obama’s successful negative (-) plan to “fundamentally transform” the U.S. was — he will have no choice but to expand upon his apparent new-found conservatism and embrace the limited-government (including separation of powers), free-market medicine as prescribed by our Founders more than two centuries ago. And if he doesn’t and ends up just getting stuck in the biofilm, well, we’ll essentially have what we have now.

Most Americans who recognize the rapidly fading health of this nation are intelligent enough to read and understand the Trump warning label with its list of possible side-effects. The Trump phenomenon shows just how desperate Americans are in that so many are willing to accept these potential side-effects for the possibility of seeing a cure delivered to even one area of this progressive disease.

A one-term presidency in which much of the immigration problem is cured (although I personally don’t think a wall would be as necessary if the giant red carpet were removed through entitlement reform) and ObamaCare repealed, minus any other major reforms would be an enormous success.

While Donald Trump isn’t the candidate that I’ve been supporting throughout this race, I’ve come to the realization that prescribing the needed liberty-saving medicine is mostly pointless without the ability to penetrate and break up the biofilm currently protecting Washington, D.C. With that said, at some point certain conservatives may want to stop trying to destroy the liposome and instead begin preparing to help influence what types of medicine go into it.

While the Hillary campaign is headed toward the ditch, more and more vehicles are appearing on the roads and in parking lots displaying “Bernie 2016” or “Feel the Bern” bumper stickers. By showing support for a socialist/Marxist, it’s as if the owners of these cars are in essence exclaiming: “I have a right to your stuff!” It’s like looking at tiny billboards that flash the message: “I have zero respect for your liberty and property rights.”

So why, pray tell, should we in turn show respect for their property? Couldn’t the tables easily be turned on these Bernie supporters by instead reading the bumper stickers to mean “free car for the taking” or “community car”?

Now, I’m not suggesting people take arms and demand Bernie supporters give up their autos at gunpoint. That’s something only our benevolent government can pull off unscathed. But these Bernie stickers could make for some great conversation-starters. So if you encounter a car sporting one of these anti-American stickers and you (or someone you know) don’t own a car or you just spot one that you really, really, really like (notice many are on much nicer cars than one would normally expect to see on lefty-mobiles) because it’s way cooler than the one you own, why not politely ask the “privileged” owner to redistribute it to you in the name of fairness and equality (of outcome)?

Now, if a Bernie fan suddenly comes down with a case of “socialism for thee, but not for me” syndrome and flat-out refuses to give you ____ (insert preferred gender identity here) car, before you give up and call ____ a spoiled hypocrite, at the very least request that ____ give you a “free” ride somewhere. And ask ____ to stop and throw in a “free” cup of coffee or perhaps even a “free” lunch while _____ is at it. We could call it the “Bernie Car-Share Program” or simply “The People’s Cars.”

While Uber perfectly exemplifies the superiority of the capitalist system and the redundancy of most government regulation (think unnecessary, high-paying cushy jobs for bureaucrats and rampant cronyism), why call up an Uber driver and waste your own resources when you can hitch a ride with an idealistic Bernie driver – for “free”?

Like him or not, Trump has awakened a pro-America sleeping giant, while on the other hand, Sanders has awakened sleeping tyrants. The sad irony is that if Bernie supporters were to get what they wish for and he is elected president, they and the rest of us will in fact “Feel the Bern” and end up with a nasty (and possibly incurable) case of VD (Venezuela Disease).

Government regulation is a hidden tax that now consumes an astonishing $1.9 trillion of the U.S. economy per year. I’m preaching to the choir here, but for those seeking ways to converse with others about how destructive and unnecessary most regulations are, try discussing the voluntary exchanges that occur while dining out at a favorite restaurant. People may go for the food, atmosphere, or for economic reasons, but they do so primarily out of self-interest. And neither local politician nor D.C. bureaucrat is needed to tell them where to go, what to eat, how much to eat, how to eat it or how much money to spend. If the food sucks, the service is terrible, if someone gets food poisoning, no form of regulation is needed to tell even low-info types it’s time to dine elsewhere.

Regulatory aficionados (such as Obama, Bloomberg, and Jonathan Gruber) think otherwise and believe we’re all too stupid to make everyday decisions on our own. And unfortunately, too many Americans appear to feel that much of this regulation is both necessary and innocuous. But people should understand that just as government regulation isn’t needed to “save” them from a terrible dining experience, the same holds true with regard to nearly all the voluntary transactions that occur within the marketplace, e.g., what size soda to buy; the securing of a payday loan; ensuring restaurant employees wash their hands; the amount of salt preferred in food or the minimum wage that is paid to an individual.

Additionally, those in support of being “protected” by the nanny-state should be aware the cost to society is even greater than what is easily seen (to borrow from Bastiat). Sure, it’s easy to envision the added expense of compliance: the permits; the mountains of paperwork; the time-consuming inspections or costly signage that regulations impose upon businesses. But what also needs to be visualized is the enormous, ever-growing army of unelected bureaucrats that politicians put in place to bring about and enforce all of this needless regulation.

So while dining out, it’s as if a large group of regulators are seated with us in the restaurant, unnecessarily making numerous decisions for the patrons, restaurant owners, employees, vendors, and about darn near everything else — bolted down or otherwise. These “public servants” consume resources as if they’re at an all-you-can-eat buffet, continually search for new things to regulate and compliance is never optional. In the end, it is “We the People” who are stuck paying the entire bill, part of which now ends up on the “credit card” for future generations to labor over.

The crux of the problem is that even if these regulators were to do as efficient a job as the free market — they can’t and don’t — they are merely “dining” at the expense of everyone else in the “restaurant.” It’s impossible for society to truly “progress” when a growing number of unaccountable bureaucrats are gobbling up tax dollars for no reason and driving up product and service prices with an ever-growing number of superfluous dictates. Free markets (combined with equal protection under the law) are already self-regulating because unlike the DMV, Post Office or Amtrak, businesses that fail to modify bad or inefficient ways will eventually go out of business. So why then are we constantly being force-fed more and more of these redundant regulations?

The dirty little secret — the rancid meat statists attempt to heavily season over with the promise of Utopia — is that coupled with an entourage of hungry bureaucrats and cronies, top-down regulatory control enables folks like Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Barack Obama, and a host of status quo Republicans and Democrats to gain real power and become fantastically wealthy without ever having to provide anything of real economic value to society. Making a living in this way is a much easier task than having to provide a product or service to citizens (like a restaurant owner or the Koch brothers must do) who are able to freely vote yea or nay with their pocketbooks.

This is in part why the zip codes that surround the D.C. area have become among the wealthiest in the nation. All while the labor participation rate is at a thirty-year low, food stamp usage is near an all-time high, and more American small businesses are dying than being created.

The fact that government regulation isn’t needed to enjoy a night out at a restaurant should be a fairly easy concept to grasp. But we’re not just dining with big-government, we’re being forced to live with it on a nearly 24/7 basis. And as Governor Moonbeam (a connoisseur of all things regulatory) recently said while discussing California’s government-caused water shortages: “that’s the beauty of government, it doesn’t go away.”

Nanny-state regulations and the regulators who impose them won’t “go away” unless more Americans become enlightened and begin to lose their appetite for big-government.

Finding a way to prevent the next Burger King from fleeing the U.S. (to avoid paying the highest corporate tax rates in the world) appears to rank fairly high on the priority list for both Republicans and Democrats. But the two parties couldn’t be farther apart on the appropriate policy to end these so-called “unpatriotic” tax inversions.

No strangers to coercion, the Obama administration via Treasury Secretary Jack Lew recently announced that through the use of executive action, “the agency would change several tax rules to stop companies from buying smaller, foreign firms and then moving out of the U.S.” These types of “solutions” will only serve to further slow down an already stagnant economy.

Alternatively, Republicans support free market solutions (at least some still do) and believe that a lowering of the corporate income tax rate would put an end to these tax inversions and help revive the economy. Better yet, as John C. Goodman asks in a recent Forbes piece: “Why do we have a corporate income tax in the first place? Economists know that corporations don’t pay taxes. People pay taxes.” Good question.

But given the Republican Party’s messaging problem, how could they get a majority of the public to support any kind of meaningful corporate tax reform let alone abolition? Although Americans would clearly benefit from the resulting combination of higher wages, new business creation, higher dividends, and lower product and service prices, the mainstream media instead focuses on one thing — corporate greed.

Unlike Republicans, if the Democrat Party were to suddenly be in support of eliminating the corporate income tax (I know, stay with me here), they would sell it in a way that would excite the electorate and have the American people marching in the streets demanding it.

Perhaps Republicans could attain that very same outcome by proposing a corporate tax reform plan that includes profit-sharing with employees — one that cuts the corporate tax rate by 50% and effectively abolishes it at the same time?

First, eliminate all loopholes that help enrich politicians, squander company resources on (legal) tax avoidance and give crony corporations an unfair advantage in the marketplace. Then allow businesses to either “patriotically” pay the full 35% rate on profits (we could call this the Buffett option) or instead keep 50% of the taxes due, and then distribute the remaining 50% equally among all employees. This would have the effect of a 50% tax rate cut for corporations, an immediate income increase for workers and — perhaps most importantly — keep the bulk of this supply-side money out of the mismanaging, economy-killing hands of the elites in Washington, D.C.

But what about corporations that employ large numbers of non U.S. workers? Should they be rewarded for shipping jobs overseas? In a piece over at Breitbart, Rick Manning calls for a reduction of the corporate tax based upon the number of U.S. employees the firm employs: “Eliminate all corporate tax breaks, and replace the current code with a tiered tax system based upon how many of your workers are employed in the United States.”

The same concept could be easily applied to a profit-sharing tax plan. Corporations with zero foreign workers could pay zero in taxes while businesses with seventy percent of their workforce in the U.S. would have to pay thirty percent of the taxes due and the remaining seventy percent could be kept with half of it distributed to their American employees.

While some politicians are scheming for ways to bring home the 1.4 trillion or more in corporate profits parked overseas (which would only further line their pockets as well as those of their cronies), this profit-sharing tax plan could provide for a tax holiday under the same terms and help bring back some of this money in a way that would actually stimulate the economy.

Democrats claim that they want the economy to grow; that they want to see more money in the pockets of American workers and that they want to keep American jobs from being shipped overseas. This plan would certainly move us towards accomplishing all three of those goals.

With the labor participation rate at a record low, isn’t it time for Republicans to start being creative and — at the very least — call their bluff?

The so-called “comet of the century,” a sungrazer named ISON, reached perihelion on Thanksgiving Day, but didn’t live up to its expectations to wow the masses and just fizzled out. Perhaps ISON’s name should be changed to ‘Barry’s Comet’ as it appears to be the perfect metaphor for the Obama Administration’s rise and fall.

While comets put on a dazzling show with their brilliant comas and alluring tails that extend for many thousands of miles, solar radiation slowly strips away most of their mass (largely a loose conglomerate of dust, ice, rocks, and gases), eventually leaving just a dull, tiny, often misshapen core. While the illusion from a distance can be quite spectacular, when exposed to sunlight, comets are in reality just objects that are falling apart before our eyes.

Instead of maintaining the United States on solid, stable, constitutional ground, President Barack Obama is the latest “politician of the century” to tempt us with a dazzling “progressive” display — a loose conglomerate of hope, change, economic egalitarianism and “fairness” for all, yet hiding a thinly veiled dull, misshapen, statist central planning core. Despite years of media filtering, the recent exposure of ObamaCare, NSA, Benghazi, IRS and other Obama scandals to intense ‘sunlight’ are finally causing his Presidency to fizzle-out as the public can now see a portion of what lies beneath the unsustainable promises surrounding the core of his ideology.

Not only did America fall for Obama’s awe-inspiring tale of “hope and change” and twice elect him to the office of president, but Obama himself seemed even more self-assured than the mythical Icarus as he delivered his nomination victory speech back in 2008:

America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.

The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people… I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth…

Not all scientists were fully convinced of ISON’s “comet of the century” hype:

Some reporters have started calling ISON the “Comet of the Century,” but Don Yeomans of NASA Near-Earth Object Program thinks that’s premature.

“I’m old enough to remember the last ‘Comet of the Century’,” he says. In 1973, a distant comet named Kohoutek looked like it would put on a great show, much like ISON. The actual apparition was such a let-down that Johnny Carson made jokes about it on the Tonight Show. “It fizzled,” says Yeomans. “Comets are notoriously unpredictable.”

Many were of course skeptical of the promise of Obama too, especially those old enough to remember another “politician of the century” from the late 1970’s by the name of Jimmy Carter, and we shouldn’t need to be reminded of how that dud of an event turned out for America. ‘Barry’s Comet,’ is merely the same old statist core surrounded by a repackaged conglomerate of utopian promises that history proves (as do the jokes on late night TV) has zero chance of delivering on any of the hype.

While it remains to be seen if President Obama will endure the same fate as Icarus, just like Comet ISON, his “progressive” world view is predictably unable to withstand the intense ‘sunlight’ of truth, and is rapidly falling apart. The only remaining question is whether or not the United States will suffer the same fate.

There is a fundamental difference between economists and lawyers (or legal scholars) when it comes to resolving complex social and economic problems. Economists believe that human behavior and the functioning of institutions are based upon incentives. Lawyers and legal types believe that one can resolve complex problems by passing laws and imposing regulations. The latter think one can legislate away the problem.

I like to describe the approach by lawyer-types to such problems as “rain laws.” They are like trying to resolve the problem of flooding from heavy rainfall by means of a law making it illegal for it to rain.

Like so many things that seem new, ObamaCare is in many ways old wine in new bottles.

For example, when confronted with the fact that millions of Americans stand to lose their existing medical insurance, as a result of ObamaCare, defenders of ObamaCare say that this is true only when those people have “substandard” insurance.

Who decides what is “substandard”? What is older than the idea that some exalted elite know what is good for us better than we know ourselves? Obama uses the rhetoric of going “forward,” but he is in fact going backward to an age when despots told everybody what they had better do and better not do.

Hey Mr. President — if ObamaCare (ironically named the “Affordable” Care Act) is such a wonderful thing for the American people, why aren’t they treating it like the perquisite you claim it to be?

I ask this because you’ve been out there claiming that Republicans are willing to “harm” the American people by defunding ObamaCare and are trying to do so only to “stick it” to you. (Why do you always think everything is about you?) Also, your ally, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is saying that once Americans really start experiencing it (the “Affordable” Care Act), they just won’t want to let it go.

But the American people are starting to experience ObamaCare and they surely just want to regain the freedom to “let it go.” Due to this law’s costly burdens, thousands are being laid off, having their work weeks reduced to less than 30 hours or are being thrown out of their current health plans. And for the privilege of all of this, Americans will be stuck paying much more than before this monstrosity was enacted.

And how do the politically-connected Americans you surround yourself with feel about ObamaCare? Surely if your health care law is so beneficial, those with the most political capital must be running to the front of the line to cut in front of everyone else and climb on board?

To the contrary, your friends in high places are asking for (more like demanding) protection from ObamaCare. You’ve exempted Congress and most of its staff from this law. You’ve given thousands of waivers to a select few. Even some of your biggest supporters, the labor unions, now realize how harmful this law is to its members and are demanding special treatment — I’m sure they’ll get it even though they haven’t as of yet.

So let me see if I’ve got all this straight: you say that the Republicans in Congress are trying to “harm” the American people by attempting to legally exempt everyone from this law that they didn’t want in the first place. So does this mean that you are intentionally “harming” or attempting to “harm” Congress, unions and all of your favorite crony donors by illegally giving them exemptions from ObamaCare? I didn’t think so.

So, Mr. President, If ObamaCare is the panacea that you and your administration claim it to be, I have one more question. If you had a son, would his health plan look like ObamaCare?